Let Us Pray

"Oops," I thought. Maybe I shouldn't have said it that way. But I want to be able to say, "Let us pray." I also want to be inclusive. I understand that many UUs are wary of prayer. My idea of prayer is, I hope, neither exclusive nor oppressive. So if the word prayer conjures images of religious fanatics or a judgmental God, or if you think you can't pray if you don't believe in God, I invite you to consider another possibility.

A few years ago, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I shared my struggles with a good friend who is committed to a Buddhist meditation practice. He wakes at 4:30 in the morning to sit. Listening to my story, he asked, "Do you have any kind of spiritual discipline or practice?" I tried to think of something. I prayed sometimes, and I had experienced a spiritual presence at times, but no, there was nothing I did with any kind of regularity or discipline. At about the same time another friend suggested I try committing to a regular spiritual practice. But I resisted. I was afraid of where the process might take me, the questions it might bring up.

Eventually I began to pray at the start and end of each day. Each morning I woke before the rest of my family and sat or kneeled in front of a window looking out on two tall spruce trees. Before going to bed, I spent a few more minutes in the same spot. This became my routine. I liked being up before dawn, seeing the day coming on, and sitting in darkness in the evening. At times I worried that I wasn't doing it right. I wondered how long it would take for me to get some answers. Over time I began to see that this was more about the practice than about getting somewhere. Just as physical exercise makes your body work and feel better, doing these spiritual exercises seemed to sharpen my senses. I became more aware of my own feelings, more aware of the presence of God in others, and in the world. I credit my prayer practice with putting me in a place where I was able to hear the call to seminary and to say yes to it. Last spring I took a class called "The Life of Prayer." In addition to the usual course requirements of reading and writing, we had to commit to at least thirty minutes of prayer and meditation a day. The main reason I took that class was to have the discipline of a prayer practice imposed on me for a semester, and it worked--it was a deep and meaningful experience.

But what is prayer? Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day" offers about the best non-definition of prayer I know. She writes:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed.

Some time ago, I read these words: "Pray for an hour a day. When you're busy, pray for two hours." Now, I don't typically pray for an hour a day. I don't even have a particularly regular prayer practice right now. But I see the wisdom of this saying. Years ago I read parts of Steven Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. One of these principles is "First things first." He says we often spend most of our time doing the little things in life that need to be done, but that don't really matter. The bigger things we put off until we get the little things done, and we never get all the little things done. Prayer helps me to put first things first. Spending an hour doing nothing when there is so much to do seems crazy, but somehow the time I spend in prayer shifts my perspective. I'm more able to focus on what's really important. To anyone who has a full schedule, this might seem impossible. But it works. Pray every day, and when you're really busy, pray a bit more.

So far I've focused on individual prayer. There are other kinds of prayer too. Last summer, working in a hospital chaplaincy training program, I spent time with patients and their families as they faced illness, suffering and death. We often prayed together, and our prayers were as varied as their individual lives. Many people asked me to pray with them. Sometimes I would offer to say a prayer, but I often hesitated. I never wanted to give the impression that I thought someone ought to pray. Prayer should be free of any sense of guilt or ought.

In the hospital, I prayed with the other students in my program as well as with patients and staff. Prayer was an honest acknowledgment that we were in a situation that was beyond our control. To my surprise, I often found myself saying to others, "I'll keep you in my prayers." Now, I don't know how prayer works. I tend to think of God as the life force in the universe, rather than as a personal God that responds directly to our prayer requests. Still I see the value of images, like those from our opening hymn, of "strong mother God," and "warm father God," and "joyful darkness far beyond our seeing." But you can pray without believing in God. Think about Buddhism, which generally does not make any theistic claims. But who would doubt that Buddhist meditation practice is the deepest kind of prayer? Regardless of who we address our prayers to, I do believe that prayer works, in a mysterious kind of way. Scientific studies have shown that patients who are being prayed for, even when they are unaware of it, heal better than those who aren't. We don't need to understand prayer to use it, or to benefit from it.

I want to tell you about two different ways that prayer affected my work as a hospital chaplain. Two weeks into the program, I told some of my fellow students that I seemed to be picking fights with my wife, and not being very present to my children. I worried that the stress and sadness of the hospital was taking a toll. My colleagues took this seriously. They told me I needed to figure out a way to stop taking the hospital home with me. I didn't know how to do this, but a few days later, a way appeared. Walking across the parking lot at the end of the day, I stopped and turned back to look up at the hospital. I thought of the patients I had just been with, and all the others I knew nothing about. Then a prayer came to mind. It's from the Episcopal prayer book, and is listed as a prayer "for those we love": "Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to your never-failing care and love, knowing that you are doing for them better things than we can desire or pray for." I said this prayer for the patients, families and staff in the hospital, those I had met and the many others, and then I turned and headed for home. This became my leaving ritual. I'll never know if this little prayer had any effect on those people. I do know how it changed me, how it allowed me to let go of what I could not control, to trust in something beyond myself. Saying this prayer allowed me to leave my work until I came back the next day.

My second example is similar. Every time I walked into a patient's room, I never knew what I would find there. The challenge was to be present to the moment. My supervisor had a motto I found extremely useful. He'd say, "don't anticipate--participate." I got into the habit of taking a minute to center myself before I began visiting patients. Arriving on my assigned floor, I would go into the small staff restroom, lock the door, stand or kneel in front of the sink, and say a prayer. It usually went something like this: "God, thank you for giving me this work to do. Lead me where you want me to go today. Make me an instrument of your peace and love, and guide me toward those who need what I have to offer. Give me the strength and courage to do your will. Amen."

Thinking back on the many people I met, the many stories I listened to, I remember so many grace-filled moments. What a privilege it was to be with people in such critical times in their lives. Again and again, in unexpected ways, I felt my prayer was answered.

I find myself praying for people a lot these days. Sometimes I pray for my children as they get on to the school bus, or I pray for a neighbor who has been diagnosed with an incurable disease. This week I got e-mails from fellow divinity school students asking for prayers for two people in our community who had each lost a loved one to death, and for others who had family members in the military being deployed to the Persian Gulf.

Unitarian Universalist minister Sarah York describes the Quaker way of "holding a person in the Light." She writes: "I do not always pray for people in a traditional way, but I keep a written list of the names of those I want to hold in the Light. It goes on a tag that I stick to my desktop, where I will see it several times a day. As I say people's names, I hold them in the Light. This is more than thinking of them or caring for them or wishing them health. I call on a transcendent and mysterious power that I cannot name." York quotes a colleague who says, "I don't really know if prayer makes things happen. But I have no doubt, prayer makes love flow."

Several years ago, a member of my church in Portsmouth died of cancer. At his family's request, we said the Lord's Prayer in unison at his memorial service. Afterwards, my wife Tracey said that she was moved by praying out loud, together. It doesn't seem to happen that often in UU churches. We sit together in silence, we sing hymns and say our affirmation of faith. I wonder, given our theological diversity, how might we pray together? How do we hold each other in the Light?

The 46th Psalm says, "Be still and know that I am God." The psalmist describes my experience of prayer. In the stillness I know things that I tend to forget when I am too busy, or too preoccupied, or too worried, or too fearful. Being still doesn't make those things go away. What it does is help me to see more clearly what is important, to remember that I am not at the center of the universe, that I am not in control. And this feels good! Being still, I know that what Rabbi Abraham Heschel says is true, that "just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy."

So, however we may define prayer, let us pray. In whatever ways we find life affirming, let us pray. For our selves, for those we love and even for our enemies, for this planet and all its creatures, let us pray.

Mary Oliver writes

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?